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Topic: Puzzlement (Read 4133 times)

The way the 'How is Your Family Weird?' thread seems to be veering off into puzzles.

We have a number of puzzle people here. How about a thread on our puzzling preferences?

I love the NY Times crosswords and Double Crostics.

I also enjoy British crypic puzzles. Finding a book of these is a treasure. The high point of my month is when the new Harper's arrives. I dearly love the variety cryptic in each issue. It's as good as a lobster dinner.

However, I strongly dislike Sudoku. I understand that they're accessible to anyone anywhere in the world but I resent them. The shelf space given over to Sudoku in the book shops has severely reduced the number and variety of crosswords available. How dare they st stocking Daily Telegraph puzzle books!

Big fan of crosswords, particularly the Sunday NYT and the Washington Post Sunday one (I can't recall who does that, it's also carried in other papers). I tend to do them back to back, so my personal pet peeve is when they repeat clues between the two puzzles, sometimes on the same day's puzzles!

Sudoku, both samarai and original flavors. Not as big a fan of the 4x4 blocks, the ones that use letters, though.

Anagrams/jumbles, especially the Scrabble (game) one. I've occasionally done the cryptics but our current paper doesn't have a good one. Never heard of cryptic crosswords, that sounds really challenging!

Actual jigsaw puzzles. DH's extended family are big fans too, so I brought some of my favorites to share over the holidays. Two of them weren't even considered due to perceived difficulty, and after I left they finally gave up on the one we started because I wasn't there to keep hacking away at it. And I didn't even bring the one that doesn't have edge pieces ("Impossible" puzzle type).

I love word puzzles. The ones found in the Dell and Penny Press Variety puzzle books are great. I play daily on allstarpuzzles.com. I've had to peel myself off the Word Mine games there as I was getting addicted and neglecting my household. The only word puzzles I don't really like are word search puzzles, as they're not really about vocabulary but about visual skills (IMO) and they hurt my eyes.

The word search puzzles in Games Magazine are interesting. Once the words have all been circled, the leftovers spell out an interesting or humorous quotation. They don't tell you it's there but it does make the game more interesting.

Kakuro.Never caught on very big, so hard to find books now, but I do have an app that I like.( I guess sudoku crossword would be one way to describe. Laid out like a crossword with intersecting points, like sudoku you use 1-9 up to once per line, but you have to add up to a number given by the puzzle on the side of each line. I assume the math part is why it didn't catch on ( and it is highly embarrassing the number of simple math mistakes I make at times)).

The word search puzzles in Games Magazine are interesting. Once the words have all been circled, the leftovers spell out an interesting or humorous quotation. They don't tell you it's there but it does make the game more interesting.

Ooh, yes. Games Magazine is wonderful. I love the 'World's Most Ornery Crossword', the cryptic crosswords, and the outrageous things that Bob Stigger comes up with.

In the early days of Games Magazine each issue included a fake ad. A classic was the ad in the 1980s for the combination word and food processor. 'We won't mince any words talking about our product, but we could'. Finding the fake ad was part of the Games Magazine experience.